Issey Miyake's 50 Years of Making Connections

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Issey Miyake, now 76, has been exploring the connections among fashion, art and technology for close to half a century.CreditBrigitte Lacombe

By Liza Foreman

Dec. 2, 2014

TOKYO — In one of the six Issey Miyake boutiques that line a small, unnamed street in the Aoyama district, a sales assistant got ready to work some magic. She pulled a loop attached to a piece of silvery material that had been carefully folded flat and suddenly, like a puppet in an experimental theater for cloth, an angular dresssprang to life, one of the latest styles for the Miyake 132.5 brand.

Clothing, the word that the designer prefers to “fashion,” has been at the heart of Issey Miyake’s work since he established the Miyake Design Studio in 1970. “I am most interested in people and the human form,” Mr. Miyake said in an email interview. “Clothing is the closest thing to all humans.”

But in an increasingly interconnected fashion world, Mr. Miyake understood far earlier than most the value of incorporating the disciplines of technology and art in his work. Indeed, he has been exploring the connections among the sectors for close to half a century.

Posters on display in the Miyake boutiques actually told some of the story. One highlighted the designer’s collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, the Paris institution where he has shown his own work and that of others several times. Its website, which introduced the Hiroshima native as “the most fascinating fashion designer of our time,” included a photograph of the designer’s “Vivid Memories” show earlier this year, a display of his artful IN-EI shadow-sculpture lamps made from recycled materials and based on research by Jun Mitani, a computer scientist and associate professor at the University of Tsukuba.

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Mr. Miyake's IN-EI shadow-sculpture lamps, based on research by Jun Mitani of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, displayed at the "Vivid Memories" exhibition earlier this year at the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris.CreditLuc Boegly

The second poster advertised 21_21 Design Sight, Mr. Miyake’s own seven-year-old museum in Tokyo, and its current exhibition “The Fab Mind: Hints of the Future in a Shifting World,” the work of 24 groups of artists and designers trying to resolve social issues through design.

“Today, it is accepted that all design intersects, there are no boundaries between art, design and other creative activities and they all intersect,” Mr. Miyake wrote. “All of my work stems from the simplest of ideas that go back to the earliest civilizations: making clothing from one piece of cloth. It is my touchstone. I believe that all forms of creativity are related.” (The designer wanted an email interview because, his secretary said, he prefers making things to talking.)

Noriko Kawakami, a design journalist and associate director of 21_21 Design Sight, is just one of the many people who see Mr. Miyake as much more than a fashion designer: “He is a true artist who teaches us what really is important for society, by constantly questioning, and also being socially active.”

Mr. Miyake spent most of the 1960s studying and working in Paris and New York, returning to Japan to open his design studio in 1970. Art played an important role from the beginning: His first Issey Miyake collection, for fall 1971, featured a dress with a Japanese-style tattoo print of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix created by Makiko Minagawa, an artist who joined the studio staff. It is now in the collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute, Japan’s foremost fashion institution.

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From the 1998 exhibition "Issey Miyake Making Things," at the Fondation Cartier in Paris: "Morimura's Doll," by Yasumasa Morimura.CreditRaymond Meier

Mr. Miyake actually played a role in founding the costume institute. In 1975, he was instrumental in bringing Diana Vreeland’s “Inventive Clothes: 1909- 1939” from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, an exhibition that set off the institute’s creation. (As co-founder in 2012 of the Society for a Design Museum in Japan, Mr. Miyake now is working toward yet another museum.)

Throughout the ’80s, as Mr. Miyake added labels and the roster of store sites grew, he worked beyond cloth to create garments from plastic, paper and wire. In 1982, a gown made of rattan vines from his Body Works collection was shown on the cover of Artforum magazine: “It was unheard of for a piece of clothing to be featured in an art magazine,” Mr. Miyake said.

His work has been featured in a long list of exhibitions, too, with his first show at the Fondation Cartier — “Issey Miyake Making Things,” in 1998 — also breaking new ground. “Showing the process of making things and even the title was avant-garde,” said Hervé Chandès, the Fondation’s general director, who has gotten to know the designer over the years.

Mr. Chandès recalled being fascinated that the exhibition involved not just Mr. Miyake but the entire studio staff. “It is a whole community of people,” he said.

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The 21_21 Design Sight museum in Tokyo, designed by Tadao Ando for Issey Miyake.Credit21_21 Design Sight

The designer said group enterprise is a key element of his creativity. “My work has always been a team process: made up of collaborations with the staff within the studio,” Mr. Miyake wrote. “I feel that you always see things in a different way when you allow others to become part of a creative process.”

The “Making Things” exhibition, he continued, “provided an opportunity to showcase my collaborations on Pleats Please with artists such as Yasumasa Morimura, Tim Hawkinson, Nobuyoshi Araki and Cai Guo-Qiang, who staged an actual explosion at the Fondation Cartier’s glass building.”

(Pleats Please, introduced in 1993, is a collection of polyester garments heat-treated to create permanent pleats. And, Mr. Cai explained, the blast was an experiment to see how gunpowder would affect it.)

Mr. Miyake’s “one piece of cloth” premise grew into A-POC, a special collection first shown for spring 1999 and added to the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in 2006. It involved clothing cut from a single tube of fabric, an idea the designer developed with Dai Fujiwara, a textile engineer and designer in the Miyake studio, and played with in 2000 when the renowned artist Yayoi Kusama embellished it with her trademark polka dots.

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The artist Yayoi Kusama added her trademark polka dots to Mr. Miyake’s A-POC collection for this 2000 event at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.CreditSylvain Bélan

Mr. Miyake also has worked with dancers, architects and photographers. “My ultimate collaboration was with Mr. Irving Penn,” the designer wrote, referring to the more than 10 year exchange that began in the late 1980s. “I would send him my clothing in New York and he would photograph them as he saw them. Seeing my clothing through Penn-san’s eyes always inspired me beyond my wildest dreams and gave me courage to go further forward.”

The designer certainly has been a pioneer in matching fashion with art, said Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “Long before Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton began doing this, Issey Miyake was collaborating with artists,” she said.

And he has been part of the broader discourse. “At least since Warhol, there has been no clear consensus as to what constitutes art,” she continued. “There is nothing physical that says this is or isn’t art. What has evolved is the idea that anything can be art if there is a consensus by the art community. That is where fashion has not yet received parity and is where, say, jazz was 30 years ago.”

Akiko Fukai, director and chief curator of the Kyoto Costume Institute, sees it a bit differently: “His work is art. It gives us pleasure and surprise visually, as well as convenience physically.”

Since Mr. Miyake stepped back from designing the main Issey Miyake line in 1999, younger designers now are in charge, with Yoshiyuki Miyamae doing the women’s collections and Yusuke Takahashi, the men’s. But Mr. Miyake still oversees the creative output of all 11 design studio brands, is director of his museum and has a direct hand in the Reality Lab, a group he created in 2007 to develop, according to the company website, “environmentally friendly and resource-conscious materials to remake and recreate even better things.”

Its results have included the 132.5 line, folded and creased clothing of recycled polyester created with computer graphics applications developed by Mr. Mitani, and the IN-EI lighting collection, made in collaboration with the Italian company Artemide.

At 76, Mr. Miyake takes a broad view of the future. “I never really analyze what I am doing or how it fits in,” he said. “However, I do always try to go forward and for that end I train my mind and constantly work on research and development.”